A Corpus-Based Study of Body-Part Terms in Verbal Phraseological Units in English and Albanian

Abstract

This paper focuses on the use of body-part terms in verbal phraseological units in English and Albanian. By using parallel texts from two different languages, we are going to recognize the structural, semantic, and stylistic properties of body-part terms as well as their cultural context. By comparing structures involving body terms in one language and their equivalents in another, we aim at showing the differences between these languages in the conceptual patterns and grammaticalization, which seem to be widely certified for this part of the lexicon. 18 items representing the terms for body parts (head, face, eye, brow, ear, nose, tongue, mouth, lip, neck, tooth, hand, leg, knee, heel, shoulder, finger, back) were checked in both English and Albanian and compared semantically based on a corpus of verbal phraseological units retrieved and later selected from 8 literary works in English and 12 in Albanian and 3 idiomatic dictionaries. In the course of our findings, we discovered important similarities and differences between the two languages in the use of body-part terms. In this study, both quantitative and qualitative criteria were taken into account and some cultural nuances were drawn from the interpretation of data.